


Swamp of Frightened Souls

by lirin



Category: 19th Century CE RPF
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-09
Updated: 2016-07-09
Packaged: 2018-07-22 14:57:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,068
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7443532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lirin/pseuds/lirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eleven people following a creek to freedom, but what if they lose their leader?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Swamp of Frightened Souls

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lunatique (lunafana)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunafana/gifts).



It was close on midnight between the new year and the old, nearly a week on their journey, when Minty fell asleep suddenly.

The band of escapees was wading through the swampy shallows of the creek when it happened. Minty was in the lead, as she always was, because she knew the way. Ben and his intended wife Jane were a few yards behind her, holding hands to stay together, and the rest of their group was spread out behind in ones and twos. There were eleven of them all told, the largest group that Minty had ever led.

“Minty!” Ben whispered urgently. He dropped Jane’s hand and rushed forward, not minding the splashes that moments before he had been trying his hardest to avoid. “Minty!”

The water was shallow, but deep enough to cover the prone body of his sister, who was scarcely five feet tall. Ben grabbed her by the shoulders and hauled her back into the night air, but she didn’t gasp or react at all. Was she even breathing? He bent closer. Yes, her chest was rising and falling slightly.

Jane was right behind him. “Is she having one of her spells?” she asked. “I thought you said she’d outgrown them.”

“I hoped she had,” Ben said. “But I’ve scarcely seen her in years, so I couldn’t know.” He found a dry hillock on the bank and set his sister down. “Minty?” he whispered again. There was no response. “Harriet?” he tried. That was what she called herself now, after their mother and after one of their lost sisters, but the name still seemed strange to him. But then, he and Jane and the others would likely be changing their own names soon as well. Strange names for a strange new home: perhaps it was fitting.

As the others straggled up and gathered round, Minty still hadn’t moved. A few of them were able to find footing in the damp sod of the narrow riverbank, while the others stayed in the water. Ben could scarcely see his companions in the dim starlight, but he thought that they looked as lost as he felt. What were they to do now? Minty had said they would leave the creek after a while, and none of them knew the landmarks that showed where to leave the water, nor the path to continue from there.

Robert, their eldest brother, knelt beside him. “What should we do?” he asked. Robert was older than Harriet, a full-grown man, yet here he was looking to their little sister’s leadership just as much as Ben was.

Minty remained still. Ben remembered seeing her like this when they were younger; he used to worry that she was dead when she didn’t move for so long. Perhaps she would die now. It didn’t seem fair for her to die here in a slave-state swamp, when she’d been to the Promised Land.

“Snakes!” Jane exclaimed from where she stood knee-deep in the water. Her cry was repeated by others in the group. “Snakes!”

Ben started to shush them but then he realized what they’d said. “Where?”

“There!” Jane pointed towards where John Chase, the youngest member of the party, was scrambling frantically towards the bank.

“Get out of the water!” Robert called. He scooped Minty up in his arms. “We can’t stay here. Even if we can’t continue on, we can find somewhere safer to wait for Harriet to wake up.”

The others shared his eagerness to get out of the water and perhaps even dry off. Although there were no trails in this part of the wilderness, they were able to wend their way through the tightly-packed trees and find higher ground away from the water—and hopefully away from snakes and other dangers as well.

Even though the small band of travelers hoped they were the only people for miles around, they did not want to risk a fire. Instead, they took off all the wet clothing they could do without and huddled together for warmth, pulling on whatever coats and blankets they had managed to bundle up and keep dry during their walk. Jane wrapped her coat around Minty, whose extra clothing had been soaked when she fell. Ben’s coat wasn’t much bigger than he was, but if he held Jane close, he could make it work for both of them. He welcomed the excuse to hold her close, and she seemed to appreciate it just as much, nestling into his side and resting her head on his shoulder. 

For nearly an hour, the group sat close together, clothes slowly drying and tired muscles stiffening as their leader slept. And then, just as quickly as she’d gone to sleep, she was awake again.

“Why did you leave the river?” Minty asked. She stood up and glanced at the sky. “We’ve lost an hour; we’ll have to walk fast to arrive by dawn.”

“We weren’t sure which way to go without you,” Robert answered her question.

“It’s just as well,” she said. “While I was sleeping I saw danger at Reverend Carter’s house, so we’ll need to stay away.” She paused to think, staring into the sky. Ben wondered if she saw something more than just the half-obscured moon and hazy stars that he saw there. What did danger look like to her? Had she dreamt of men lying in wait at their destination, or of a wrongness in the stars, or perhaps even a burning bush warning them away like the first Moses? Whatever she’d seen, Ben knew he trusted his sister more than anyone else to keep them safe.

“We head back to the creek,” Minty said finally. “But we’ll leave it at the first bend and head west. With a fast pace, we can reach Mr. Hartney’s house before the countryside wakes.”

She set off without waiting for acknowledgement, and they trailed after her.

***

Nathan Hartney was in his front yard, feeding his chickens in the twilight, when they straggled up to the house. “Thank God you came here!” he exclaimed. “We got word last night that Reverend Carter was arrested for harboring fugitives, and I was worried you would go to his house and be caught in a trap. Quick, inside!”

“You needn’t have worried,” Ben told him as he passed him in the doorway. “My sister has a gift.”

“That she does,” Hartney replied, and closed the door.

**Author's Note:**

> Although most of the details are invented, this story is based on real events. Three of Harriet Tubman's brothers were among the 10 or 11 people she rescued in December 1854, on her 6th or 7th trip back to Maryland. The abolitionists Hartney and Carter are my creations, but everyone else actually existed. And Tubman did experience unpredictable sleeping spells throughout her life, the product of a childhood injury when a slave owner threw a metal weight at her head. 
> 
> Sources referenced: 
> 
> First of all, although I didn’t use them for researching this story, I would like to acknowledge the children’s books about Harriet Tubman that I read growing up and that gave me a respect for this amazing woman. Even though it had been many years since I had read any of them, when I glanced over her Wikipedia page while deciding which historical figures to offer, I realized that I remembered reading about many episodes in her life and got very excited about getting to explore her life further. The books I read as a child were _Freedom Train_ by Dorothy Sterling (1954); _“Wanted Dead or Alive”: The True Story of Harriet Tubman_ , by Ann McGovern (1965); and _In Their Own Words: Harriet Tubman_ by George Sullivan (2001).
> 
> As I looked into biographies for more adult audiences in preparation for this story, I had the good fortune to stumble across _Harriet Tubman: Myth, Memory, and History_ by Milton C. Sernett (2007), which I found to be an utterly fascinating book. It focuses on the historiography of Tubman as much as on the biography of Tubman—how people’s perceptions and knowledge of her have developed over the past century and a half. If you’re only going to read one book about Tubman, this is the one I’d recommend, because it synthesizes most of the other books about her and gives you a more balanced overview than you’d get from any other single book.
> 
> Lastly, Kate Clifford Larson’s lengthy biographical efforts may be a bit overly detailed for the casual reader but they’re perfect for a fic writer. (Where else would I have been able to find the few details that are available about Tubman’s siblings, particularly my central character Ben?) _Bound for the Promised Land: Harriet Tubman, Portrait of an American Hero_ (2004) contains the fruits of an impressive amount of research that greatly increased the amount people knew about Tubman and busted some myths. Larson also has [a website](http://www.harriettubmanbiography.com/) which I would recommend as an awesome starting place if you want to learn a bit more about Tubman without reading an entire book.


End file.
